Player One and Main Character

Gideon Jacobs considers what Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as odd couple in chief, have in common.

By Gideon JacobsApril 17, 2025

• Politics

• Memoir & Essay

IN 2016, ELON MUSK was onstage at Code Conference when someone from the audience had a question about the simulation hypothesis. As soon as Musk realized what subject the attendee was bringing up, he smiled, mischievous and giddy, an adolescent given explicit license to talk about his crush after friends banned him from doing so. When the audience member attempted to form a question—“Have you thought about this, and—” Musk interrupted: “A lot.” He summarized the argument for why we may be living in a simulation (without crediting Nick Bostrom, the philosopher most associated with it), but was then pushed for his personal opinion on the matter. He responded plainly, “The odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.”

That was the summer before the presidential election. Musk was ranked by Forbes as the 45th richest person in the world and had just donated $5,000 to Hillary Clinton, the presumed next president of the United States. Two years later, after hopping around the forties and fifties on the Forbes list, Musk was smoking a joint on Joe Rogan’s podcast when his favorite subject came up again: “[I]f you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will be indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will end. One of those two things will occur. Therefore, we are most likely in a simulation, because we exist.”

Musk is now the richest person since Rome’s Augustus Caesar and Mali’s Mansa Musa (adjusted for inflation). He is also the Sieg-heiling “First Buddy” to Donald Trump, tasked with dismantling the American government so as to secure a Viktor Orbán–like stranglehold on power for the president he loves “as much as a straight man can love another man.” Recently, he made his first ever appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he was greeted with a cartoonish diplomatic offering—a chain saw—by Argentina’s cartoonish new president, Javier Milei. Musk mimed chainsawing the Deep State for a bit, growling awkwardly, then sat down and reflected on how he ended up here: “I am become meme.”

Musk and Trump may be the two most powerful people alive—we can let them fight over the order—but they’re an odd couple. Musk is, at his core, an autistic nerd, and Trump, at his, a 1970s bully repulsed by nerds. Musk is deeply ideological, holding impassioned views about humanity, society, and technology. Trump, although far more ideologically oriented than he was in his first term, is still a flexible opportunist, a spacious Trojan horse for ideologues, impassioned only by himself. Of course, these very different men share some obvious traits—pathological narcissism, and lust for attention, power, and money, to name a few—but their most significant commonality is something rarer and more fundamental. In short, they both behave as if reality is, to some degree, fiction.

By “fiction,” I mean representation, and by representation, I mean roughly the same general definition I gave the word “image” in an essay I wrote just before the election: “any abstracted piece of reality—any form, concept, or story” (or, keeping Musk in mind, any meme or simulation). In that essay, I argued that Trump—though he has never outright declared it at CPAC—had become an image, which was why I believed, despite countless missteps, that he was at the peak of his powers; in a world increasingly experienced in two dimensions, the walking, talking image has home-court advantage. Kamala Harris was a normal politician, constrained by her tether to reality like, say, an old-fashioned photograph. Trump was a liar who couldn’t lie, much like an AI image cannot lie. Duplicity requires duality.

Trump’s journey in fiction began in 1973 when he was taken under the wing of notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who taught him the dark arts of controlling perception in tabloid-era New York, how to bombard reality with one’s preferred image of it. But it’s clear his most formative experience of fiction came later, during the reality TV boom of the aughts. In the years leading up to The Apprentice (2004–17), Trump’s businesses were collapsing, causing his reputation to collapse. Then, he found himself playing a successful businessman on a hit TV show. His reputation recovered, causing his businesses to recover. Cohn himself—betrayed by Trump before his death in 1986—couldn’t have designed a better teaching moment for his old mentee, a reminder of which direction the arrow between images and reality points.

It makes sense, then, that Trump essentially casts government positions, hiring based on how candidates look and behave on camera. Experience and competence are secondary. Image of experience and competence is primary. Or, considering how many members of his senior staff, from Pete Hegseth to Mehmet Oz, have played experts on TV, one could argue that Trump does, in fact, value experience and competence—it’s just in the performing arts, not national defense or medical administration. Before Secretary of Education Linda McMahon became a Trump mega-donor, she was the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, whose family dramas were scripted kayfabe storylines. Before Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy rose to prominence as a host on Fox News, he refined his craft on The Real World: Boston (1997) and Road Rules: All Stars (1998), the latter of which—to Duffy’s credit—involved traveling by RV.

Musk’s journey in fiction began in video games. At age 12, he made a Space Invaders knockoff called Blastar and sold it to a South African magazine for $500. One of his first jobs was as a low-level programmer at Rocket Science Games. Now in his fifites, the CTO of X, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and father of at least 14 children still makes time to explore the immersive worlds of Diablo IV (2023), Elden Ring (2022), Mass Effect 2 (2010), Overwatch (2016), and others. He once called himself “a living god of video games” (though he recently admitted to paying people to play as him). But more telling than the fact he’s a gamer—61 percent of Americans are—is an anecdote from Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Musk. According to the book, Shivon Zilis, mother of four of Musk’s children, once told him, “I have this feeling that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”

Where Musk’s and Trump’s fateful journeys in fiction met was inside Twitter, a grand, dynamic arena of user-generated storytelling, a proto-virtual reality written one 140-character-long fan fiction at a time. Graphs illustrating the sheer volume of content the two men contributed to the platform are stunning. Before Trump was kicked off Twitter in 2021—still headed by Jack Dorsey at that point—he was tweeting an average of 35 tweets a day. Musk—the addict so addicted that he bought the cartel and changed its name—is averaging 113 posts a day on the platform, which he acquired in October 2022 and renamed X not long after.

It may sound obvious because we now know, whether statistically or anecdotally, what being “very online” can do to a person. Still, it’s worth highlighting just how clearly it was immersion in Twitter that transformed these relatively apolitical, even left-leaning businessmen. Many who knew Trump and Musk before their respective immersions sound uncannily similar when talking about the surprising new leaders of the American Right. Whether it’s Musk’s famed friend-turned-enemy Kara Swisher, or George Clooney, who remembers Trump as a run-of-the-mill “knucklehead […] just a guy who was chasing girls,” the sentiments are often the same: he was different; something happened.

What happened? What changed? I don’t think Musk and Trump were simply radicalized on social media like the average Rust Belt uncle. I think these periods of their lives also accelerated and intensified their descents into fiction, their respective evolutions into living-breathing avatar and character. In those years, both men, already shielded by their immense wealth, already rewarded for decades of bombastic risk-taking in move-fast-break-things Silicon Valley and greed-is-good New York, grew even more uninhibited, impulsive, and brash. It was almost as if they were beginning to feel—and, in some sense, be—free of the fundamental quality that distinguishes reality from fiction: consequence.

To be clear, I do not believe that Musk would casually jump off a building as if he were in a video game, confident he would respawn or wake up on his couch in base reality. That said, it’s difficult to ignore that a man who has repeatedly stated we are likely living in a simulation is making world-altering decisions with an “I wonder what that button will do” attitude. It is similarly difficult to ignore that he is behaving like a gamer who has already mastered a game, when the new curiosity becomes its glitches, the new challenge breaking it. Consider Musk walking into Twitter’s headquarters for the first time carrying a bathroom sink just to make a pun. (“Let that sink in.”) Employees about to lose their livelihoods would have been right to wonder, “Does he think this is a joke?” or “Does he think this is a game?”

I don’t believe Donald Trump literally thinks he is still on reality TV, but the man has had cameras following him around for most of his life, and he just wrapped a campaign season that was essentially a yearlong show with a $16 billion production budget. It would be understandable if the lines have blurred for the 78-year-old. That blur would make it slightly more fathomable that he could be so at ease doing “the weave” in front of reporters and Benjamin Netanyahu, improvising on the most complex geopolitical issue in modern history like a performer “trying something,” an actor who knows he can always “take it again,” that the editors can “fix it in post.”

The dangers of even a minor version of this kind of ontological misalignment are obvious and horrifying. Musk and Trump are marrying previous centuries’ tried-and-true tactics of rendering people subhuman—racism, sexism, and tribalism in its various forms—with a new technologically informed mode of othering that can render people nonhuman. It’s no coincidence that NPC—a video game acronym for non-player character—has become an alt-right term of art. Musk is Player One and, though he needs friends and foes on his hero’s quest to save the world, anonymous people have no plotlines, are not living agents. Trump is Main Character and, though he needs supporting sidekicks and villains to round out his cast, everyone else is a faceless extra, cinematic filler, decoration.

At this point, it seems widely acknowledged that much of the pleasures of following these men are those of consuming fiction: drama, comedy, surprise, distraction, meaning, and more. Musk and Trump are clearly aware of this and optimize their behavior accordingly. But to simply classify them as shameless showmen who have exploited Americans’ bottomless appetite for entertainment would be to overlook what lies at the root of their appeal. That is, when these men speedrun through the world as if it’s just fiction, I think a very human part of most people—left, right, and center—hopes or even senses that they’re right.

At its tonal worst, the American Left can prescribe too much weight and consequence to quotidian affairs. There’s a specific brand of liberal confidence in the high stakes of everything that can make seriousness appear unserious, urgency melodramatic, and sincerity naive. Behind the trolling Right’s inane love of “liberal tears” and Musk’s claims that Democrats want to “murder comedy” is a fair criticism. The Left can lack perspective. Its tunnel vision often leaves no room for a wider view that would allow for levity, for language to be just words and identities just concepts. This is why I think Hakeem Jeffries’s recent post on X—subject to much criticism from his side of the aisle—was a step in the right direction for atheists and theistic Democrats alike: “Presidents come and Presidents go. Through it all. God is still on the throne.”

Spiritual movements often occur when there’s desperation in the air and begin with a seed of doubt. Is reality as it seems? This doubt can be conspiratorial in nature, a suspicion that truth is hidden in plain sight, that the stories that uphold the status quo are just stories. Of course, even secularly speaking, we know this to be true. Humans project meaning onto matter. We build consensus realities with shared constructs. The objective world is unknowable given the limits of subjective experience. Typically, it is religious prophets who give this type of nagging suspicion large-scale credence, offering glimpses of God and gods, divine orders and afterlives, and, more generally, spiritual insights that can render everyday life less weighty. They offer a diversified ontological portfolio.

The American Left’s perspectival inflexibility often precludes that kind of balance. In not treating any elements of reality with the levity of fiction, progressives left the country more vulnerable to exciting, highly immersive fictions (read: charlatanism). Trump and Musk are charlatans, after all. They are reverse-enlightened, false prophets playing with prophetic mechanisms. These spiritually illiterate and bankrupt billionaires have offered their followers the relief of believing that consensus reality is—to use Eastern terms—provisional and illusory. Whereas history’s holy figures offered a higher plane, Musk and Trump sell a lower one: a neo-gnostic red-pill myth co-authored by them, their surrogates, QAnon, the 2,500 LARPing revolutionaries of January 6, millions of other Americans, and likely a few Russian operatives. Trump—a man who avoids questions about his favorite Bible verse by saying, “I don’t want to get into specifics”—is embracing his new role as prophet-king. Interviewees for jobs in his administration are being asked when they experienced their “MAGA revelation.” Minutes after Musk put down his chain saw, he said, “We’re fighting the Matrix big-time here.”

So, what to do? Attempts to expose their fictions as fictional haven’t worked. Anyone who has ever tried to reason with a devout MAGA supporter knows the frustration of trying to convince an indoctrinated cult member. It’s the sort of incredulous exasperation I imagine that Musk’s ex felt when telling him he lives his life as if it’s a video game. Or that Volodymyr Zelenskyy felt when Trump said he doesn’t “have the cards right now,” with the Ukrainian president pleading, “I’m not playing cards. I’m very serious.” Or that establishment Democrats felt after spending a decade throwing punches at Trump, only to watch him grow stronger.

Maybe the lesson, then, is that, if Kamala Harris spent $1.5 billion shadowboxing, Trump should be treated more literally like a shadow, an image, a character, a human being living on a different ontological plane, invulnerable to attacks on this one. With that premise entertained, an obvious strategy starts to emerge: turn away from the images; turn toward the light projecting them. Don’t punch the shadows; douse the fire casting them on the cave wall. Put less metaphorically, what T. J. Clark said to close his January essay in the London Review of Books: “A plan of campaign, with spectacle the enemy.” In 2025, I think we can approximate that fuzzy you-know-it-when-you-see-it term of theory with a more colloquial one: the internet.

I’m not an engineer or an internet scholar. I have only a vague understanding of the many proposals floating around about how to improve the place we now spend around 40 percent of our waking hours, and about how corporations could be pressured into doing so. I also realize that such a “campaign” would almost certainly have to take place largely on the internet, resulting in a blatant master’s-house-master’s-tools conundrum, not to mention a momentum easily squashed by the small handful of companies who control everything we see and hear. All that said, I believe such a campaign would be immensely popular.

In a country supposedly at pre–civil war levels of polarization, anxiety about the internet is a rare bipartisan sentiment. Eight states recently adopted a ban or restriction on cell phones in schools: California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia—red, blue, and purple. There are currently 23 states considering similar actions. The vast majority of American parents, 86 percent, are concerned about social media’s effects on their children’s mental health, while 77 percent think tech companies have too much power. Donald Trump’s approval ratings may be holding steady for now, but Elon Musk’s, Mark Zuckerberg’s, and Jeff Bezos’s are not. And, maybe most simply and importantly, most people now seem to agree that the internet just makes them feel bad.

The Democratic Party clearly recognized an opportunity when they saw a mafia of billionaires onstage at the inauguration, but they made a mistake in focusing solely on the group’s wealth, trying so hard to get the word “oligarchy” trending. The campaign must be against those who control what is trending, must designate Big Tech as foe. It would be a politics which recognizes that, though the problems are nuanced and many, at their common core sit the products of a small subculture in Northern California. A voter’s relationship to technology is replacing relationship to government as the orienting issue of American politics. This is what made the Left versus Right spatial metaphor look outdated in recent elections, hippies and NIMBYs crowding the tips of the ideological horseshoe. RFK Jr.’s tentpole causes—anti-vax, anti-pharma, pro-environment, pro-nutrition—are, however misguided, just concerns about biotechnologies. His rise to relevance is indicative of a fast-swelling neo-Luddite wave, and artificial general intelligence hasn’t even arrived yet.

The advent of the printing press is inextricably linked to the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict that killed at least 20 percent of Europe’s population. Elon Musk recognizes the internet as a similarly transformative force. His broken phrasing at CPAC, “I am become meme,” was not an accident or typo. He was referencing Robert Oppenheimer, who, after witnessing the first nuclear test, paraphrased Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Donald Trump is a loud, painful symptom distracting from the disease: Silicon Valley, the internet in its current form, a spectacle that tends to bring out the worst in us and elevate the worst among us. If the world’s eyes remain glued to this realm of images and memes, reality will continue optimizing for compelling ones, becoming a place where, as Musk sometimes says on X, “The most entertaining outcome [as if we were in a movie] is the most likely.” That leaves the United States more watchable than livable, a country where neither compassion, intelligence, nor God himself can compete with a car crash.

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Featured image: Photo from “President Trump Views Teslas with Elon Musk at the White House,” March 11, 2025. CC0, whitehouse.gov. Accessed April 14, 2025. Image has been edited and cropped.